Biographies 2017

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Books published between November 16, 2017, and November 15, 2018, will be eligible for the 2018 awards. All too often he is caricatured as a chronic loser and an inept businessman, or as the triumphant but brutal Union general of the Civil War. But these stereotypes don’t come close to capturing him, as Chernow shows in his masterful biography, the first to provide a complete understanding of the general and president whose fortunes rose and fell with dizzying speed and frequency.

Before the Civil War, Grant was flailing.

A month later, none of that was true.

Levy picks you up and hurls you through the story of how she built an unconventional life and then watched it fall apart with astonishing speed. Now, he takes us inside a sphere utterly hostile to human life. He was a university student who read the Declaration of Independence and was awestruck by what might be possible in life.

Their stories reveal the capacity of the human spirit to persevere . A book may be nominated in no more than one genre category, but can also be nominated in the Debut Novel category. Living proof of his parents’ indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often absurd measures his mother took to hide him from a government that could, at any moment, steal him away.

. She survived a violent past, but created an elaborate facade to hide the truth. Between Them is his vivid image of where his life began and where his parents’ lives found their greatest satisfaction.”

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29 .) Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

Lists It Appears On:

• Multnomah County
• Sit Tableside

“Trevor Noah’s unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth.

Write-in votes may be cast for eligible books with any average rating, and write-in votes will be weighted by the book's Goodreads statistics to determine the top five books to be added as official nominees in the Semifinal Round. Richard Ford’s parents—Edna, a feisty, pretty Catholic-school girl with a difficult past; and Parker, a sweet-natured, soft-spoken traveling salesman—were rural Arkansans born at the turn of the twentieth century.

He peeled flesh off the faces of cadavers, drew the muscles that move the lips, and then painted history’s most memorable smile. In taut prose that vibrates with electricity and restrained emotion, O’Farrell captures the perils running just beneath the surface, and illuminates the preciousness, beauty, and mysteries of life itself.”

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22 .) One Day We’ll All Be Dead And None Of This Will Matter: Essays by Scaachi Koul

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In One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, Scaachi Koul deploys her razor-sharp humor to share all the fears, outrages, and mortifying moments of her life.

By analyzing the evidence and connecting the dots, Hillary shows just how dangerous the forces are that shaped the outcome, and why Americans need to understand them to protect our values and our democracy in the future.”

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10 .) What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women And The Food That Tells Their Stories by Laura Shapiro

Lists It Appears On:

• Multnomah County
• NPR Books

Everyone eats, and food touches on every aspect of our lives—social and cultural, personal and political.